John Hutton Balfour

John Hutton Balfour (15 September 1808 to 11 February 1884) was a Scottish botanist who became Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow in the early 1840s and in 1845 moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he also became the 7th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Her Majesty's Botanist; he held these posts until his retirement in 1879 and was nicknamed Woody Fibre. He was the son of Andrew Balfour, an army surgeon who set up a printing and publishing business in Edinburgh, studied at St Andrews University and the University of Edinburgh and graduated M.D. in 1832. After medical practice from 1834 he was prominent in founding the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1836 and the Edinburgh Botanical Club in 1838, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1835, aged only 26. He won the Edinburgh chair after a protracted political struggle against Joseph Dalton Hooker, served for many years as dean of the faculty of medicine, and under his care the Royal Botanic Garden was enlarged and given a palm-house, an arboretum and teaching accommodation. His publications include Manual of Botany (1848), Class Book of Botany (1852), Outlines of Botany (1854) and Introduction to Palaeontological Botany (1872), and the foxtail pine Pinus balfouriana is named after him.